Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [202]
ANNETTE LAREAU, ELLIOT WEININGER,
DALTON CONLEY, AND MELISSA VELEZ
As social behavior shifts, new cultural forms arise. For example, many of the characteristics of the middle-class mothers described in the first edition of Unequal Childhoods had become so prevalent that as the research for that edition was underway, a new term—“soccer mom”—entered the national vocabulary. In addition to prompting the development of new terminology, changes in family life reverberate through the culture in other ways. In recent years, elaborate “mom organizer” calendars have flooded the marketplace. These calendars have columns available for entering each child’s schedule, color-coded schemes for keeping track of each family member’s commitments, and stickers representing (and differentiating among) children’s organized activities. Meanwhile, some recently published advice books now warn parents about the importance of scheduling free time for their children. Professionals caution against keeping children too busy.1 Cartoons that poke fun at contemporary family life are also a thriving industry. The Doonesbury cartoon strip reproduced here captures these broader cultural patterns that are an element of the study.
This chapter applies a more analytical approach to the broader context of Unequal Childhoods. Some readers of the first edition worried that the families described in the book might not be typical. I worried too. After the book was published, I carried out a research project with quantitatively skilled collaborators, who are the co-authors of this chapter, to investigate this issue. In that study, we used a quantitative analysis of a nationally representative sample to examine connections between social class and children’s time use, particularly organized activities. Those quantitative findings are summarized here. Because the quantitative investigation shifts the focus back to children, the summary does not follow smoothly from the discussions in Chapters 13 and 14, where young adults and their parents are the center of attention. Nevertheless, the quantitative work was important to carry out. In crucial ways, the quantitative findings corroborate the ethnographic data. As is often the case, however, there are also some interesting wrinkles that could lead to further research and reflection.
Doonesbury cartoon © 2003 by G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.
Ethnographic studies like Unequal Childhoods look closely at real people as they go about their everyday lives. Ethnographers watch, listen, ask questions, and take notes as they join study participants in their daily activities. As the book reveals, gathering information this way requires a great deal of time, energy, and patience, so ethnographic researchers must limit their sample size. Some people find the results of ethnographic studies, including Unequal Childhoods, especially persuasive precisely because they draw on the carefully collected, intimate details of the social lives of a small number of carefully chosen people. Others, though, wonder whether such findings provide reliable information about people in general: what if the study participants are not typical?
The big-picture results achieved by analyzing data collected from surveys given to hundreds (or thousands) of people can—sometimes—help answer that question. But confirming findings from a small sample by undertaking a large-scale, representative survey is impractical. The costs would be overwhelming. Researchers usually have to rely on data that have been collected by someone else, for some other purpose. This is the case with our efforts to confirm the key conclusions of Unequal Childhoods.2 We turned to a nationally representative data set that is well regarded by social scientists: the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID is a longitudinal data set containing information on a representative sample of families in the United States. It is known for having high-quality measures of economic and financial variables. A special module of